by Len Deighton
Still puffing his pipe Frank got to his feet and gave me one of his ‘we’ll-see-one-day’ smiles. When we got to the door he said, ‘I’ll acknowledge Dicky’s memo on the teleprinter, and we’ll get together late tomorrow so you can take a verbal back to him. Will that suit you?’
‘Just right! I wanted to have a day sightseeing,’ I said.
He nodded knowingly and without enthusiasm. Frank didn’t approve of some of my Berlin acquaintances. ‘I thought you might,’ he said.
It was about one-thirty when I got back to Lisl Hennig’s little hotel. I’d arranged that Klara should leave the door unlatched for me. I crept up the grand front staircase under crippled cherubs that were yellowing and cobwebbed. A tiny shaded table lamp in the bar spilled its meagre light across the parquet floor of the salon, where the enormous baroque mirrors – stained and speckled – dimly reflected the tables set ready for breakfast.
The pantry near the back stairs had been converted to a bedroom for Lisl Hennig when her arthritis made the stairs a torment to her. There was a wedge of yellow light under her door and a curious intermittent buzzing noise. I tapped lightly.
‘Come in, Bernd,’ she called, with no hint in her voice of the frailty I’d been led to expect. She was sitting up in bed, looking as perky as ever: cushions and pillows behind her and newspapers all over the red and green quilt. Reading newspapers was Lisl’s obsession.
Parchment lampshades made the light rich and golden and made a halo of her disarranged hair. She had a small plastic box in her hands and she was pushing and pulling at it. ‘Look at this, Bernd! Just look at it!’
She fiddled with the little box again. A loud buzz with a metallic rattle came from behind me. I was visibly startled and Lisl laughed.
‘Look at it, Bernd. Careful now! Isn’t that wonderful!’ She chuckled with delight. I jumped aside as a small olive-coloured jeep came rattling across the carpet, but it swerved aside and rushed headlong at the fireplace, hitting the brass fender with a loud clang before reversing and swinging round – antenna wobbling – to race across the room again.
Lisl, who was wrestling with the controls of this little radio-controlled toy, was almost hysterical with joy. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it, Bernd?’
‘No,’ I said. Not wanting to tell her that every toy shop in the Western world was awash with such amusements.
‘It’s for Klara’s nephew’s son,’ she said, although why Lisl should be playing with it in the small hours was left unexplained. She put the control box alongside a glass of wine on the bedside table where the wind-up gramophone, and a pile of old 78 records, were at her elbow. ‘Give me a kiss, Bernd!’ she ordered.
I rescued the little toy jeep from where it had come to a halt on the rumpled carpet and gave her an affectionate hug and kiss. She smelled of snuff, a heavy spicy mixture that she’d spilled down the front of her bed jacket. The idea of losing this crazy old woman was a terrible prospect. She was no less dear to me than my mother.
‘How did you get in?’ she said and glared at me. I moved back from her, trying to think of a suitable answer. She put on her glasses so that she could see better. ‘How did you get in?’
‘I…’
‘Did that wretched girl leave the door on the latch?’ she said angrily. ‘The times I’ve told her. We could all be murdered in our beds.’ She hit the newspaper with her loose fingers so that it made a loud smack. ‘Doesn’t she read the papers? People are murdered for ten marks in this town nowadays…muggers! heroin addicts! perverts! violent criminals of all kinds. You only have to go a hundred metres to the Ku-Damm to see them parading up and down! How can she leave the door wide open? I told her to wait up until you arrived. Stupid girl!’
The ‘stupid girl’ was almost Lisl’s age and would be up at the crack of dawn collecting the breakfast rolls, making coffee, slicing the sausage and the cheese, and boiling the eggs that are the essential constituents of a German breakfast. Klara deserved her sleep but I didn’t point this out to Lisl. It was better to let her simmer down.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I had dinner with Frank.’
‘Frank Harrington: that snake in the grass!’
‘What has Frank done?’
‘Oh, yes, he’s an Englishman. You’d have to defend him.’
‘I’m not defending him. I don’t know what he’s done to upset you,’ I said.
‘He’s all schmaltz when he wants something but he thinks only of himself. He’s a pig.’
‘What did Frank do?’ I asked.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘No thanks, Lisl.’
Thus reassured she drank some of her sherry, or whatever it was, and said, ‘My double suite on the first floor had a new bathroom only a year or two ago. It’s beautiful. It’s as good as anywhere in any hotel in Berlin.’
‘But Frank’s got this big house, Lisl.’
She waved her hand to tell me I’d got it wrong. ‘For Sir Clevemore. He stayed here long ago when your father was here. That’s before he became a “sir” and he’d be happy to stay here now. I know he would.’
‘Sir Henry?’
‘Clevemore.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Frank got him a suite at the Kempi. Think of the expense. He would have been happier here. I know he would.’
‘When are we talking about?’
‘A month…two months ago. Not more.’
‘You must have made a mistake. Sir Henry has been sick for nearly six months. And he hasn’t been in Berlin for about five years.’
‘Klara saw him in the lobby of the Kempi. She has a friend who works there.’
‘It wasn’t Sir Henry. I told you: he’s sick.’
‘Don’t be so obstinate, Bernd. Klara spoke with him. He recognized her. I was so angry. I was going to ring Frank Harrington but Klara persuaded me not to.’
‘Klara got it wrong,’ I said. I didn’t like to say that it was the sort of story that Klara had been known to invent just to needle her autocratic and exasperating employer.
‘It’s a beautiful suite,’ said Lisl. ‘You haven’t seen that bathroom since it was done. Bidet, thermostatic control for the taps, mirrored walls. Beautiful!’
‘Well, it wasn’t Sir Henry,’ I said. ‘So you can sleep easy on that one. I would know if Sir Henry came to Berlin.’
‘Why would you know?’ she said. She grinned from ear to ear, delighted to catch me out in a self-contradiction, for I’d always kept up the pretence that I worked for a pharmaceutical company.
‘I get to hear these things,’ I said unconvincingly.
‘Good night, Bernd,’ she said still smiling. I kissed her again and went upstairs to bed.
As my foot touched the first stair there came a sudden blast of sound. A Dixieland band, with too much brass, giving ‘I’m for ever blowing bubbles’ a cruel battering. The volume was ear-splitting. No wonder Lisl’s hotel wasn’t overcrowded.
I had my usual garret room at the top of the house. It was a room I’d had as a child, a cramped room, overlooking the back of the house and the courtyard. It was chilly at this time of year. The effects of the hot-water pump didn’t seem to reach up to the top of the house nowadays, so the massive radiator was no more than tepid. But the indomitable Klara had put a hot-water bottle between the crisp linen of my bed and I climbed into it content.
Perhaps I should have been more restrained when drinking my way through Frank’s big pot of strong coffee, for I remained awake for hours thinking about Fiona who would by now be tucked up in bed somewhere just a few blocks away. In my mind’s eye I saw her so clearly. Would she be alone or were there two people in that bed? A deluge of memories came flooding into my mind. But I forced myself to think of other matters. Lisl and what would become of the old house after she sold it. It was a valuable site: so near the Ku-Damm. Any speculator would do what all speculators do everywhere: chase out the residents and the family-owned shops and old-fashioned eating places
, bulldoze everything in sight to build ugly concrete and glass offices that yielded high rent for landlords and high taxes for the government. It was a depressing thought.
And I thought about Klara’s provocative little story about spotting the Director-General in the Hotel Kempinski. It didn’t make sense for a number of reasons. First the D-G was sick and had been for months. Secondly he hated to travel anywhere outside England. The only official trip he’d done, apart from the odd conference in Washington DC, was to the Far East. As far as I could remember the D-G hadn’t visited Berlin for at least five years. And, thirdly, had he come he wouldn’t have taken a room in a big Berlin hotel: he’d have been Frank’s house-guest, or if it was official, been a guest of the general commanding the British forces. But where Klara’s story really rang false was saying that the D-G recognized her. The D-G couldn’t remember the name of his own Labrador dog without having Morgan – his faithful attendant – prompt him.
I tried to sleep but sleep didn’t come. There was so much to think about. And I couldn’t help noticing the promptness with which Frank had denied knowing Jim Prettyman. He hadn’t hemmed and hawed or asked why I’d mentioned his name. It was a flat no and a change of subject. It wasn’t like Frank’s normal behaviour to be so lacking in curiosity: in fact it wasn’t like anyone’s normal behaviour.
6
‘I told Willi not to put that damned machine in here,’ Werner said, looking up from his big plate of beef to where two white-coated surgeons were poking screwdrivers deep into the entrails of an old jukebox that had clearly been kicked into silence. Willi Leuschner, the proprietor, watched as grim-faced as any grieving relative. Apparently certain pop-music aficionados of the late evening hours voted with their feet.
We were sitting in one of the booths near the window. When we were kids we had all firmly believed that the people in the window seats got bigger portions to attract passers-by. I still don’t know whether it’s true or not but it wasn’t something that either of us wanted to take a chance on.
‘You can’t trust music critics,’ I said. ‘Toscanini could have told him that.’
‘I’ll bet that his jukebox is not insured,’ said Werner. He had the sort of mind that thought in terms of expenditure, percentages, interest rates, risk and insurance.
‘It was offered cheap,’ I explained. ‘Willi thought it would bring more teenagers.’
‘He’d make a lot of money from penniless teenagers, wouldn’t he?’ said Werner with heavy irony. ‘He should be glad they keep away, not trying to find a way of attracting them.’
Even after a lifetime’s friendship, Werner could still surprise me. It was his often expressed view that juvenile delinquency was to be blamed on TV, single-parent families, unemployment or too much sugar in the diet. Was this new reactionary stand against teenagers a sign that Werner was growing old, the way I’d been all my life?
Werner made his money by avalizing: which means he financed East European exports to the West with hard currency borrowed from anywhere he could get it. He paid high interest and he lived on narrow margins. It was a tough way to make a living but Werner seemed to flourish on the hazards and difficulties of this curious bywater of the financial world. Like many of his rivals he had no banking experience, and his formal education went no further than the legerdemain that comes from prodding a Japanese calculator.
‘I thought you liked young people, Werner,’ I said.
He looked at me and scowled. He was always accusing me of being intolerant and narrow-minded, but on the issue of keeping my haunts Jungend-frei I was with him, and so were a lot of Berliners. You don’t have to walk far down Potsdamer Strasse before starting to believe that universal military conscription for teenagers might be a good idea.
There was something different about Werner today. It wasn’t his new beard – a fine full-set with moustache – when it was fully grown he’d look like a prosperous Edwardian beer baron or some business associate of Sir Basil Zaharoff. It wasn’t just that he was noticeably overweight, he was always overweight between his dedicated slimming regimes; nor the fact that he’d arrived absurdly early for our appointment. But he was unusually restless. While waiting for the meal to arrive he’d fidgeted with the salt and pepper as well as tugging at his earlobes and pinching his nose and staring out of the window as if his mind was somewhere else. I wondered if he was thinking of some other appointment he had, for Werner, in his tailor-made suit and silk shirt, was not dressed for this sort of eating-place.
We were in Leuschner’s, a once famous and fashionable café near Potsdamerplatz. It was shabby now and almost empty. It had been like this for many years, for the great expanse of Potsdamerplatz – once the busiest traffic intersection in all Europe – was now a still and silent place where armed sentries patrol constantly between the massed barbed wire and, with a compassion not extended to their fellow-countrymen, carefully restrain their attack-trained dogs from running into the minefields. And as the district became a backwater, Café Leuschner became the sort of place where men were cautious what they said to strangers, and policemen came regularly to inspect everyone’s identity papers.
Once great luxury hotels stood here, adjacent to the mighty Anhalter railway terminal, that was the biggest in the world. The posters in the museum listed one hundred and forty-five trains arriving each day, eighty-two of them long-distance luxury expresses that came complete with cocktail bars, sleeping compartments and diners. Beneath the road, by means of a specially constructed tunnel, baggage porters, labouring under steamer trunks and cases made of the hides of crocodile and pig, and smartly dressed pages conducted the arriving passengers under the swirling traffic, directly into the plush foyer of the famous Excelsior Hotel next door. Here they would be conveniently close to the fine shops of Leipziger Strasse, the embassies, palaces and grand houses that adjoined the Tiergarten, and the government offices of the newly created German Reich and the Palace of its Emperor. By day the traffic seemed never-ending; and the night-life continued until breakfast was served free to any reveller who was still awake.
Now the Anhalter Bahnhof is gone, except for a large section of old yellow brickwork that used to be the ticket hall. In summer it is lost amid a tangle of weeds. Behind it, as Werner and I had discovered in our schooldays, there is a vast no-man’s-land of rusting rails, collapsed roundhouses, skeletons of old sleeping cars and signal boxes complete with handles that could be pulled. No one has passed this way since the last train left for Magdeburg in April 1945. It remains empty except for a few tramps and fugitives who spend a night sheltering in the wrecked buildings but find them too inhospitable even for their stark needs.
Grimy and neglected, this is a neighbourhood of derelict bombed buildings, roofless façades that might look like some phony cityscape built for a film, except that they are so filthy. Now this place, which once seemed like the centre of all Europe, is nothing. It is just a place past which traffic hurries to get to the newspaper offices of Kochstrasse, or to Checkpoint Charlie, which is only a short distance along this garbage-littered thoroughfare that skirts the Wall.
But Café Leuschner remains. Willi Leuschner, despite such lapses as installing a jukebox, knows how to tap a glass of strong Berlin Beer, and his Austrian wife still produces once a week the best Tafelspitz in town. And the tender boiled beef comes with little potato dumplings and the cabbage is cooked in dripping and has carraway seeds to flavour it.
As Werner came to the end of his huge portion of beef, dipping the final forkful into rather too much horseradish, it was time to tackle again the subject I’d come here to talk to him about. I said, ‘Well, I thought Lisl looked awfully well.’
‘You only saw her for five minutes,’ said Werner, wiping the final smear of horseradish from his plate with a crust of bread roll. Frau Leuschner’s powerful horseradish did not affect Werner as it did me.
‘She was sleeping this morning so I didn’t want to disturb her.’ I put the prongs of my fork into the horseradish I
’d abandoned, and tasted it again. It was very very hot.
‘She’s a stupid old woman,’ said Werner, with a sudden paroxysm of uncharacteristic bitterness. It was a measure of his frustration. ‘The doctor told her again and again to lose weight and take things easy. She drinks, she smokes, she gets excited, she argues and loses her temper. It’s absurd.’ Perhaps it wasn’t bitterness so much as grief that I heard in his voice.
‘You say she had a stroke?’
‘The hospital gave her tests and said they couldn’t be sure.’ He put the last piece of bread in his mouth and chewed it. ‘But either way she’ll have to have a complete rest.’
‘Who will arrange about selling the house?’ Even as I said it I realized what a big task was involved. There would be meetings with the property agents and with the bank, a lawyer and a tax accountant too, plus all the form-filling and petty bureaucratic rigmarole that makes such simple transactions into a nightmare. ‘It would be better if we could persuade Lisl to go away until it’s all done. Perhaps we could find a place in Baden-Baden. She’s always talked about taking a holiday in Baden one day.’
He looked at me and gave a twisted little smile. ‘And which of us is going to explain all this to Lisl?’ he asked.
Willi Leuschner came over to the table to clear the plates. ‘What are you two having now?’ said Willi. ‘Bread pudding?’ Willi was my age but his head was bald, and the big curly moustache that he’d grown as a joke was grey with age and yellow with nicotine.
He always used the familiar ‘du’, for all three of us had been to school together, and we understood each other better than we understood our wives. In my case much better than I understood my wife. Certainly Willi knew that Werner and I could eat unlimited amounts of the old wartime recipe that Frau Leuschner had elevated to haute cuisine by the addition of eggs and cream. He didn’t wait for an affirmative. He wiped the plastic table with a cloth and balanced the mustard pot and beer glasses on top of the plates and cutlery with a skill of long practice. Willi’s father had commanded a forbidding maître d’, a dozen waiters in tail coats and bow ties, with white-jacketed youngsters to assist them. Now Willi and his brother had only a couple of young draft-dodgers to help, and both those helpers were apt to arrive in the morning glassy-eyed and trembling.